An agile podcast, delivered by agile practitioners, focused on helping agile teams. Bob Galen and Josh Anderson use their decades of agile coaching experience to power your organizations need for agility and scale. If our 100+ episodes don't have what you need, ask us a question and we'll help you out!

It is bowl season here in the US, so we decided to explore how closely related the game of football and all of its preparation are related to traditional agile/scrum ceremonies. We think you'll be surprised to hear how closely they align...

What other parallels do you see?

Are there other sports that more closely align to agile and its ceremonies?

One of the more common questions we get centers around ways to integrate a UX team/process/approach into Agile. Bob and Josh share their experiences and approaches that worked/didn't work in hopes of helping you continually improve the integration of your UX team.

We identify a few rules of engagement for members of your organization that are not a part of the scrum team. We discuss where the term "chicken" originated from and provide tips and tricks for anyone making the transition as a leader in an organization evolving/transforming to agile. This is a key challenge for any organization transitioning to agile and, if mis-handled, often leads to a failed agile implementation.

An agile team's struggles can often be attributed to one of the primary scrum roles (scrum master, product owner, & team) running amok. Bob and Josh dig into common reasons causing each role to begin to lose its way. We then provide you with a few tools that can help correct each behavior. In doing so, you should be able to reduce the level of "amokedness" (Bob's new word) inside your agile team.

Have you ever seen any of these patterns, or maybe even a few we didn't discuss? Please share with us and your fellow listeners!

Where do great scrum masters come from and how can you groom them in your organization? Bob and Josh dig into various ways to make that happen. We also cover some of the most common anti-patterns we've seen over the years. Hopefully those anti-patterns don't sound too familiar! :)

How did you become a scrum master? Was the transition silky smooth or were there a few bumps in the road? Please share any tips in our comments or on twitter.

Too big? Too small? Just right? Where does your team fit in that paradigm?

We share our experiences in building agile teams and describe what "just right" looks like. How do you know when to stop growing or when to break up a team. We answer these questions for you.

What are your thoughts and experiences?

As a reminder, any listener question/topic that we discuss on air gets one of our fancy new stickers! Post questions in the comments, on twitter, or whatever your preferred channel is. We look forward to tackling your questions and comments!

Bonus Content:
Here a link to the recent blog post that Bob did on this topic...

We revisit our often debated topic of release planning. Josh slipped up in episode 75 and mentioned a new appreciation for the process. Given Josh's past comments about his disdain for release planning, Bob jumped all over him and demanded that our next episode centered on this topic. Find out what caused Josh to evolved his viewpoints and hear Bob grill him on this new revelation!

What are your views on release planning? When is it appropriate? If it is appropriate, how often should you do it? Who should be involved? We'd love to hear your thoughts.

As a reminder, any listener question/topic that we discuss on air gets one of our fancy new stickers! Post questions in the comments, on twitter, or whatever your preferred channel is. We look forward to tackling your questions and comments!

In this episode, Bob and Josh respond to a listener request around our views/implementations of Spotify's agile approach. Vic (@AgileCoffee) asked specifically about our view on Chapters, so we dig into what they are, how we use them, and how they fit into the whole approach.

What's your view on Spotify's spin on agile? Do you use any of their techniques?

Bonus Content:Here is the article Josh mentions that he just wrote about this topic and how Spotify's methods are applied in his company: Why We Spotify'd Our Names

In this episode, Bob and Josh wrap up their three part series on collaboration. In doing so we tackle the final step an organizaiton takes in becoming truly agile. Learn how to enable your entire company to agile through world class collaboration. We cover tips and tricks that each of us has used in the past to help our companies in this area. What tips can you share?

If you missed either of the discussions on first and second level of collaboration, they can be found below:

In this episode, Bob and Josh discuss the challenges presented to a product owner and team when stories classified as "non-product" work land in the backlog. These stories typically include architectural work, research spikes, and other technical challenges like these that end users may never see and/or notice.

We present the common problems teams run into and offer a few suggestions for how your group can execute on these just like all of your "normal" stories.

In this episode, Bob and Josh continue discussing the three levels of collaboration. After tackling collaboration inside an agile team in our previous episode, we dig into how to scale collaboration across all of our agile teams. We get sidetracked by a debate about what a healthy sprint review looks like, but we end up circling back to the topic of cross-team collaboration.

Let us know how you collaborate across all of your teams. We'd love to hear your tips and tricks.

In this episode, Bob and Josh kick off a series discussing the three levels of collaboration in an agile organization. Level one focuses on maximizing collaboration inside of each agile team. Learn the warning signs that indicate a need for you and your team to focus on improving your collaboration, along with ways to make that improvement happen.

As always, we want your feedback and any tips/tricks you may have that could help other teams increase their collaboration.

In this episode, Bob and Josh talk through common agile transition failures. We provide solutions to many of these problems so that you and your team can succeed in your implementation of Agile. We also discuss the concept of starting with Kanban instead of Scrum.

What are story points?
Why would we use them?
How do we pick a unit?
Can I make my teams all use the same numbers?
How do we get started?

We answer all of these and more as we dig into the hotly debated world of story points. Like user stories, story points are often talked about, but seldom clarified. Our goal with this podcast is to give you the tools you need to make story points useful in your organization.

In this episode, Bob and Josh respond to a listener request from @sjoerddruiven about the future of agile. We dig into our hopes for agile's future and also some realistic concerns and fears for where it could end up. What are your fears? How can you help shape agile's future?